


YOU WROTE ME LOVE LETTERS AND I KILLED YOU

by jpnadia



Series: my sword, my spear, and her [1]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Major Character Death, Don't Try This At Home, Enemies With Benefits, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Fighting and Kissing, Gunplay, Knifeplay, The Fight Scenes Are Sex Scenes, The Sex Scenes Are Also Sex Scenes, ambiguous ending, or IS it play, tltexchange2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:28:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28460907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jpnadia/pseuds/jpnadia
Summary: You were dressed in black, then, your hair falling out of your knit cap to whip like a flag of war in the air spewing out from the vents, bright enough to make your people think of victory instead of blood. You had a gun in your hand and a knife strapped to your thigh, and you were laughing as you defended the ship we had invaded.Commander Pyrrha Dve of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier trapped inside a Lyctor, fails to kill Commander Awake Remembrance Of These Valiant Dead of the Blood of Eden.Instead, she falls in love with her. It is not gentle.
Relationships: Pyrrha Dve/Wake | Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead
Series: my sword, my spear, and her [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2173455
Comments: 23
Kudos: 50





	YOU WROTE ME LOVE LETTERS AND I KILLED YOU

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zoicite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoicite/gifts).



> Written for the Locked Tomb Holiday Exchange 2020 for zoicite, who asked for "any and all" exploration of the Pyrrha/Wake romance. 
> 
> **Content Warnings** : the trauma of Pyrrha in Gideon’s body, major character death, suicidal ideation, lots and lots and lots of blood and violence.
> 
> Please take care of yourselves out there, y'all.

### Before

We fought the first time I saw you. I surfaced because he had gone into the River and left me behind to do his dirty work again, and I saw you before I saw anything else when I opened his eyes. You were dressed in black, then, your hair falling out of your knit cap to whip like a flag of war in the air spewing out from the vents, bright enough to make your people think of victory instead of blood. You had a gun in your hand and a knife strapped to your thigh, and you were laughing as you defended the ship we had invaded.

By then, I’d heard of you-- not from my brothers and sisters, and not from John, but we were, or he was, God’s intelligence. We knew of BoE, and so we learned of you. Back then, John didn’t take you seriously. I always did. 

You’d attacked me like an exploding bomb. Percussive force rained down on me, and you'd brought me to the floor under you with a bullet in his kneecap and a shoulder in his gut. The grappling hook at your belt pierced the meat of his thigh, and his body healed around the metal.

My breath came fast as you tossed your gun aside and drew your knife. You were too close for my rapier to do me any good. In a galaxy full of tissue-paper soldiers just waiting for me to tear them apart, you’d met me as an equal.

“You’re one of the wizards,” you’d growled as you opened up his brachial artery.

Blood geysered out of his arm even as the blood vessels began to knit themselves back together. It sprayed onto your face and made your hair clump together, the color of hair I knew too well, after millennia of failing to avoid mirrors.

"You caught me." I watched your lip curl, and then, before you could come in with the knife again, I twisted under you and slammed you onto your back. Your head ricocheted off the metal deck with a clang. While you were dazed from the impact, I got his feet under me, my spear into his hand. Pulling free from your grappling hook shredded his hamstring, but it had been thousands of years since the last time I’d let a triviality like that bother me.

I planted his foot square in your chest as you rose to meet me. It left a print on your shirt, a footprint in dark blood barely visible on the black weave. You fell back to absorb the blow and your boot skidded on the pool of blood you’d spilled on the floor.

You were down. All your friends were dead, an army of corpses littering the floor around you. I was sick of killing. I turned and walked away.

You shot me again as I left. The bullet lodged in his thigh. I would have to dig it out again later. Well, I probably deserved it.

* * *

_His_ hair, unlike yours, had always reminded me of blood. Now it was the only hair I had left-- they’d taken my body with them on the Mithraeum. My meat and my hair and the jelly that had made up my eyes when they were only mine and not also his-- it was all so much dust.

Seeing you was the first time I’d felt lust on his body from the inside. Later, I would revisit it, because it felt like being alive again. Like every time I’d ever fucked Ulysses or Cristabel, furtively, in a closet. My necromancer had never approved-- but I’d always had needs, until he’d killed me. I thought they’d died along with my body, but you brought them back. You wanted to live, and thrive, and kill-- and in seeing you, so did I.

So I took his hands, and I put them on his body, the planes of which I could still remember from the few occasions he’d let me touch him. He had new scars, and I knew how he'd gotten some of them. I could rummage in his memory files for the stories I didn't know, but I left it alone. I cared more about my privacy than my curiosity. After what he did--

I didn't like to think of that. I thought of you instead. I loved him once, but even when I'd asked, he would never threaten me with a gun or leach the life from my body until I lay panting and shuddering under him. You would. You _did_ , even before you knew how much I liked it.

Thoughts of you in all your violence worked better for me than it ever had when I’d experimentally put his hands on his dick. I’d thought I knew what his body liked, back when we’d both been alive, back before I’d ridden around in his flesh and learned how little he liked anything at all. But this was my brain chemistry in his meat. I didn’t know where he ended and where I began. I wouldn’t be having this problem if I’d died when I was supposed to.

I missed my own body. I missed knowing how to touch myself, missed my ability to slip into a supply closet or an empty break room and emerge five minutes later with my uniform neatly back in place and that pounding need abated. With his strange body that shouldn’t have been strange to me at all, it took me over an hour. 

I came thinking of your knife against my skin.

### Later

I want to say it was sheer chance, the first time you caught me alone. He’d already killed the planet. There was no saving it by the time he let himself slip under and I bubbled up. And there you were-- resplendent-- waiting in ambush next to his shuttle, crouched and well-hidden in tall grasses that didn’t yet know their doom. You leapt from your hiding place and caught us before I could react. I stayed still as you held the gun to the column of his spine. You hadn’t slaughtered us yet, and that gave me time to look for an opening to retaliate. 

The barrel was cold against his skin, and I shivered. It didn’t make his skin crawl, not when I was wearing it, but by then I’d learned how to feel out which bullet you’d loaded through his senses. It was about as easy as winning a claw machine game-- rigged, and it cost me every time I tried-- but I could do it eventually, and you’d left me plenty of time to make the attempt. Herald. Unmistakable. I’d made it too easy for you to catch up with us, but I didn’t care, because your body was hot and vital behind mine.

There was no opening. I was at your mercy. In the deep, secret recesses of my broken soul, I was glad.

“I’m sorry.” His voice-- _my_ voice-- grated out of his throat, shredded as easily as a carrot or a potato. By then, I’d learned why you fought and I couldn’t even argue with it. “Destroy me as I am, but I want to kiss you before I am killed.”

“Why?” You rapped it out: you were interrogating me. 

“I have only once met someone so utterly willing to burn for what they believed in, and I loved him on sight.” I sucked in air so that his chest rose and fell. That circle of metal pressed so hard into his C6 vertebra I could feel the rifling. “The first time I died I asked of him what I now ask of you.”

“He didn’t kill you?” You sounded suspicious, but you took his jaw in your free hand and twisted his face around so you could see our face. I could feel your breath on his lips.

“He did.” You still didn’t understand-- that would come later-- but I had to admire you. You never let your weapon slip.

You leaned in from behind, and your lips met his. The kiss was just as bitingly ferocious as I’d imagined every time either of us ever fought you. Your body pressed in a long lean line against his. Pleasure remained elusive when I touched his body, but every place your body touched his electrified me.

When you pulled away, you glared at me. “You’re not my type.” Your mouth had bruises on it that I’d put there, and you were breathing hard.

“So kill me.” It was dangerous to bait you. I knew better, but I still couldn’t make myself care. Emotions had been difficult ever since I’d died. Something about glands: he had them, and I didn’t. For the first thousand years, I’d enjoyed the clarity, until I’d realized how much I’d lost.

Your mouth curled, just a little, the way it did just before you scored a shot right between someone’s eyes. “Do you really want that?”

“No. I want something else.”

You took my rapier and you took my spear, casting them both aside. “Make it good, lich.” Shifting your gun into your other hand, you dragged me down on top of you and let me turn to face you. It pointed, unwavering, at his skull as you lay back with all that golden grass crushed under you.

His hands trembled as I found the zippers and buckles that fastened your armor in place. “They don’t make it easy to get these off.”

“That’s your problem, not mine.”

I managed, even though the polymer panels I’d peeled away rucked up awkwardly at the tops of your boots. Didn’t matter. I’d gotten through to the patch of red curls at the apex of your thighs. It had been thousands of years since the last time I’d done this, but I’d thought about it at length. Wasn’t much else for a soul riding pillion _to_ do. When I reached out, I found you wet under his fingers, and it made me burn.

You raked your nails over his scalp, pulling, and I took the hint. The stiff fabric of your trousers stabbed me in his abdomen, but your heady scent filled his nostrils and lay heavy and sour on his tongue. For the first time since he’d killed me, I filled out a body with my whole soul, from fingertips all the way down the hard planes of his abdomen, the chiseled cut of his hips, the way his thighs and calves bunched up as you ground yourself against his face. I was too busy to count how many times your thighs gripped his shoulders.

Your hips fit so well into his palms. 

When you’d had enough, you drew your feet up underneath me and booted his body away so hard I could feel the capillaries burst underneath his skin. Only then did you take the gun away. 

Sitting back on my haunches, I licked my bottom lip, savoring the taste of you. “Good enough for you, Commander?” I couldn’t keep the grin, _my_ grin, off his face. Satisfaction thrummed through his body, effervescent as a post-workout beer.

“Get out before I change my mind about killing you.”

As soon as the shuttle breached the atmosphere and I could leave the shuttle controls, I had to wash the traces of you off my face. It was too risky to leave evidence of our encounter behind, when my necromancer could come back at any moment. As I rinsed the last traces of you down the drain, I was already reviewing options, planning our next encounter.

I’ve never been smart when I’m in love.

* * *

####  **  
YOU HAVE ALWAYS TREATED YOURSELF AS DISPOSABLE AND I HAVE ALWAYS HATED YOU FOR THAT**

* * *

After that, we trysted. Not often-- you couldn’t always get away from your responsibilities, and even when you could, I couldn’t always wrest control of his body away from him. But I would contrive to meet you, or you would contrive to meet me. We would fight until we had gotten each other alone, until the blood sang in our veins.

I would kiss you, or, sometimes, eventually, you would kiss me. You would taste the blood in his mouth and take my weapons from his unresisting hands. We would fuck with all the passion neither of us could afford anywhere else.

Mostly it followed the pattern we’d set that first time, and you'd take your pleasure from his hands or his mouth. Sometimes, you would reach out with grasping hands, looking for our weaknesses. Sometimes, you'd light on a way to make me whimper and cry out for you, a touch that tricked his body into aligning with the pleasure I felt. The orgasms didn't matter: with you, I always felt satisfied. When I was lucky, you'd leave on wobbly legs, and I'd pretend neither of us had sworn to kill the other.

Over the years, I learned part of the secret of your courage: you arrived at our rendezvous missing a scar that I’d seen on your shin not two months before-- a scar I had put there eighteen months ago. You had replaced your old body, moved your spirit to a new one almost identical to it-- but by then I knew every mark on your skin, and I knew your soul. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t have my original body, either.

We never talked about any of it. I knew you knew my necromancer’s name-- even though it was supposed to be forgotten, I heard it in whispers as I gathered intelligence for the God I no longer worshiped. No one knew my name, because I was supposed to have died thousands of years ago, but I learned yours, Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. I cherished each ridiculous syllable the same way you cherished each Herald cartridge in your bandolier. 

And, for a time, that was enough.

* * *

We grew sloppy, my love-- _I_ grew sloppy. You were so warm, laughing at me on that narrow bunk in the shuttle because I'd insisted on a bed. (It was worth it-- for the privacy, for the ease, for the luxury of spreading you out on your back so I could bury my face between your thighs.) Even when you made me lie down on the wet spot, it was special. You were never fastidious-- you just liked that you could make me bend to your whims. And I liked it, too.

That's why I let you pillow your head on my shoulder. We had tossed all the blankets aside before we'd started, and afterwards you told me you had no intention of moving to get them. "I should go," I told you. You lay there with your whole weight on top of me with your head tucked up against my throat. Close in the way you only ever were after I'd wrung your pleasure from your body as if it was water and I was parched in the desert.

I did not go. I fell asleep with you in my arms. And he surfaced.

* * *

I don't know what happened next, not exactly. His memories weren't clear. You were angry, and you knew he wasn't me.

* * *

You were still there the next time I opened his eyes. You'd tied his wrists and ankles to the bed with the shredded remnants of the blankets you'd shunned, and you held a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. The latter was hilt-deep in one of his lungs.

It was mortifying, but even though I could feel the physical signs of fresh sex-- you'd worn me out, and then you'd worn him out all over again-- even though I knew his body was spent, I still roused under you.

You knew me right away. I was pathetically grateful for the recognition. You saw me, and you knew me. It barely registered when you pulled the knife out of my chest so the alveoli could begin to knit themselves back together. 

“What are you?” you asked. “Who was that?”

I hated to talk about it, but you deserved the explanation. When my lung had healed enough to power speech without whistling, I told you the whole sordid story: of the time when I’d still loved John. When Gideon and I had been-- whatever it was that we had been to one another. One of the first necromancers. One of the first cavaliers. There was so much of it. I was embarrassing myself in front of you.

You listened impassively. Pretended you didn’t see the bright tears in the corners of his eyes. “So you weren’t a wizard until he murdered you.”

It was a fair summary. 

“Why did he let me fuck him?” I didn’t know. It had been ten thousand years, and Gideon and I didn’t know each other anymore. Maybe he'd woken up pleasantly sore alongside you and assumed he already had.

And then, unasked for, unexpected, because you never asked-- "Can I touch you?"

Except-- now that you knew the truth-- "It's his body. Mine is gone."

"But you're in there."

Point conceded. I'd fought with you often enough that I knew when I'd lost. To know when I'd give you anything you wanted, even when the things you wanted weren't mine to give.

You bit at the creases of his thighs-- you were always all teeth, when we were like this-- ran your hands over his muscles as if he had fat deposits where he assuredly did not. Now you knew what I was, your hands had grown sure, as if instead of giving you one secret I had given you the key to all of them. You never wasted a weapon. So armed, you touched his body and took me apart.

* * *

Afterward, I lay panting beneath you.

Idly, you reached for your thigh holster. "He's not as good with his hands as you are."

"They're his hands."

"They're wasted on him. He doesn't know what to do with them." You knew what to do with yours, too. The knife you toyed with long and slim and wickedly sharp. You could run its blade over my skin so the ghost of its razor edge would kiss his skin but never cut it, not unless you meant it to. “I wish I knew what your real face looked like.”

I pushed up onto his elbows to watch as you carved our initials into the tender skin of his inner thigh. Yours first, all nineteen letters of it, and then mine: only two, but you made it count.

It didn’t last. There would be no scar. That left only the sensation, which sizzled along his once-deadened nerve endings.

There was no possible way you could rouse me again. His body needed real sleep, and food, and water. I was still disappointed when you sheathed the knife and began pulling your trousers back up.

“Pyrrha Dve,” you told me before you left. “I’ll remember you.”

* * *

####  **YOU MUST HAVE HAD SOULS ONCE, BEFORE YOU VOMITED YOURS UP FOR HIM AND HE SACRIFICED BOTH OF YOU**

* * *

We didn’t get even two years after that, though we made the most of them. It helped that my necromancer had decided to pursue this affair on his own time. It meant our paths collided more often and for longer. I could share you with him if it meant I got to feel you fall asleep on his shoulder with the blood drying on the sheets. He had forced me to share everything else with him. I had learned to take what I could get.

It didn’t last. We caught up with you in the outer reaches of space, alone in a shuttle far from the Nine Houses or the Mithraeum or anywhere else inhabited by anyone. Stale blood and fluids splattered the walls and the floor, maybe two months old, but no one had scrubbed it clean. The faint acrid scent of vomit drifted through the air vents. All of that was close enough to normal. Through his eyes, I saw that your posture had gone limp. That’s what scared me.

I fought my way to the surface. A calculated risk. If he discovered me and burned me out, it would still be better than losing you.

“Pyrrha.” Your lips were white. I wanted to bite color into them.

“Commander.” You had given me leave to shorten your name, but I had read your face and saw you didn’t like to hear it, so I called you by your title. It usually sharpened the edge of your smile to hear me give you deference. Not that day.

You turned from me. “We can’t do this anymore.” 

This hit me harder than any time you’d ever shot me, and you had shot me many times. I felt it like your knives in his organs, all of them at once. I couldn’t stop myself from protesting. “Why not?”

“Just go.” You sounded tired, and you didn’t bother to reach for a weapon. If you had shot me or stabbed me or blown me up, I would have known what to do. Faced with this quiet surrender, I stood unmoored. You had left me with no argument to make. I went.

I didn’t find out for another twelve weeks that you were pregnant.

* * *

####  **HE MIGHT PUT HIS SPEAR THROUGH MY PARASITE AND KILL US BOTH AND IT WOULD SERVE YOU RIGHT**

* * *

It didn’t take me long to work out the timeline after that. You had been avoiding me ever since you had conceived. You could replace your body, but you couldn’t replace the soul growing inside you.

My necromancer had worked it out, too. He spent his time sharpening my weapons and chasing after you. It took us four months to track you down. I couldn’t decide whether to sabotage him or help him. You didn’t want us anymore, and I lurked restlessly in the back of his mind, trying to make sense of it all.

We finally caught up to you again as you were approaching the Ninth, the closest I had ever seen you to the Nine Houses. It wasn’t anything like one of our meetings. You wore a battered haz suit, so bulky neither of us could make out your body underneath it. He moved in to fight you, and you fought like I’d never seen you fight before: as if we’d cornered you, as if your options had run thin, as if you’d already been defeated and you wanted to take us with you.

Understand this: I only let him kick you out of that airlock because I had to. I thought you would survive. You’d survived everything else.

* * *

####  **AND EVEN INFESTED WITH THE BOMB THAT WOULD BE YOUR GOD’S FLESH AND UNDOING I DID NOT WANT TO DIE**

* * *

It was nineteen years before I realized you hadn’t died any more than I had. Admittedly, that wasn’t saying a lot. He saw you first, because it wasn't safe for me to surface on the Mithraeum.

Nineteen years dead, trapped in a sword, without even a mismatched body to inhabit.

But it was you, and you always robbed me of my judgment. I risked it, slipped out in the night in only the soft flannel trousers he’d worn to bed to the niche where they'd put the body I suspected you'd stolen. I shut the autodoor behind us.

In spite of the familiarity of the body you’d stolen, in spite of everything that lay between us and always had-- I couldn't help but touch you. I lifted that limp body and realized I’d have to support its head, because you hadn’t quite figured out how to fire the decomposed muscles that had once belonged to Cytherea. She had never been healthy, even in life, and she had been dead for months before you’d stolen her corpse. You had always been so vital.

“I don’t have long.” You knew why.

“Then don’t waste our time with tepid bullshit.”

Maybe I had forgotten just how vital you’d been. There were so many things I had spent nineteen years wanting to talk to you about. "You could have told me you were pregnant."

You snorted. "And give up my weakness?"

"It could have been--" I began, not sure whether to say _his_ or _ours_ or something else entirely.

"It wasn't." Flat. Cutting off the discussion like you would sever the disused end of a rope from the length already in use, in one clean stroke with an always-sharp knife.

I wanted to know everything-- I wanted to have been there for you. "If it had been, it would have been our duty to help--"

"You swore to kill me," you pointed out. "Trust me, I know who the sperm donor was, and it wasn't either of you."

"I could have held your hair." When I’d realized, the smell of your vomit had haunted me for months.

"You should have slit my throat."

"Commander," I said, helpless, because we'd been together dozens of times where I could have slit your throat, or you could have slit his, and both of us had turned our attention carefully elsewhere.

"It's done," you said. "You want to tell me why you're trying to kill one of your own?"

"If I wanted to kill her, she would be dead," I said, and then: "I don't know why _he's_ trying."

Before you could speculate, the autodoor whooshed open to reveal the target of my counterpart's murderous intent. Every muscle in his body went tense. I set down your stolen head as carefully as I could manage. "Close the door and _go away_."

She closed the door. She went away.

But after that there was no safety, not any more. I had already risked too much, and you were struggling in your unfamiliar stolen meat. I laid you back down.

"Pyrrha." Usually your voice was enough to stop me from going. Not this time.

"You'll get the hang of it. You've never let anything hold you back before," I told you, tracing the delicate neck you'd borrowed from a woman I once knew and knew no longer. And then I left you there, lying on that cold slab.

We’d seen each other. It didn’t matter that now both our original bodies were dust. We would find each other. I didn’t have long to wait.

* * *

You stabbed him in the heart with our own spear, but you knew I would feel it. It was a love letter to me, the sharp tip embedded in his right atrium, and you signed it with the blood that poured down his chest. You knew I would fight to the surface to meet you.

The pain adhered his soul to his body. He stayed in control as you dragged him from Cytherea’s bier to the incinerator. From my vantage point, trapped behind his soul, I could see the furious panic in the thin cording of your arms as you dragged him inside the chamber. 

If you couldn’t have me, you seemed determined to kill me. I had seen you fight like this only once before. He coughed. The wound made breathing difficult.

I wasn’t fast enough, or maybe I wasn’t strong enough. Fire wreathed his body, and you left. He sat there in the growing heat, and I prepared myself to die. Had he loved you too? Had he accepted this betrayal as his just reward for what we’d done to you at God’s order?

And then Harrowhark the First came to our rescue. In the depths of the dark eyes that I knew from his memories, I saw a trace of you. I tried to rise up to meet you, but I was already too late.

### After

My necromancer died fighting the Resurrection Beast. I could feel the tether between his meat and his soul snap. That left me alone to pilot his meat through the halls of the Mithraeum, to find you and, when I saw what you’d done, to put a bullet in the head you’d stolen. And then, after a lot of conversation I could have done without, Augustine dropped the station into the River.

I never expected to live through it. Never thought I’d wash up on the shore of the river, drag my necromancer’s meat through the barrier and into the closest ship I could find.

I stumbled through the echoing hallways onto the bridge. I don’t know what I was looking for. I had no expectations, no goals, no real plan other than to keep moving desperately forward.

And you were there waiting for me, clothed in fresh flesh and a battered Edenite uniform.

(I didn’t deserve this. I had hoped that blowing up Cytherea’s skull would free you, but hope isn’t a plan.)

Somehow, you had a doll there. Adult-sized, based on a picture of myself I’d had to steal from my necromancer to show you. You’d only seen it once, because I couldn’t keep it without arousing suspicion. The features weren’t quite right-- or maybe they were, and it was my memory that was faulty. I would never see my old face again; the album I’d taken it from had gone down with the Mithraeum, and I had no intention of retrieving it.

You lifted your gun and pointed at me in the familiar steady hands I loved so much. “Now?” you asked.

"Don't forget you have to sever the brain stem," I told you, which you already knew. In my defense, I was nervous.

I didn’t know if your plan would work. You were the experienced revenant, and I was a complete neophyte. Neither did I care. We were together. I would inhabit the soul-empty doll you’d spliced together for me and live a mortal life at your side, or I would die at your hand. Either option suited me.

“Are you ready?” From you, this was tenderness. You hadn’t even put your finger inside the guard yet.

I had only ever died once. Stalling was beneath me. “Do it.”

You pulled the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Isabelle_Saphir for the sensitivity read.


End file.
